At Control, the supposed successes of group Leuthen against surface and air escorts in September outweighed the disastrous failures of groups Rossbach and Schlieffen in October. Hence Control had not the slightest intention of scaling back or canceling operations on the North Atlantic run.
The loss of U-tankers, most recently U-460, seriously cramped operations in that area, especially in the distant western Atlantic near the Grand Banks. To carry on, Control was compelled to divert the two remaining XB minelayers in the Atlantic force to be provisional refuelers. These were the new U-219 and U-220, commanded by the old hands Walter Burghagen, age fifty-two, who had entered the Imperial Navy in World War I, and Bruno Barber, age thirty-nine, respectively. Burghagen in U-219 sailed from Norway on October 22 to back up the Type XIV tanker U-488. At about the same time, Barber in U-220, who had planted a minefield off St. John’s, Newfoundland, on October 9, was also directed to assist U-488, either by giving her surplus fuel or taking on her surplus fuel so U-488 could race to France, fill up, and return.
So valuable were these two Type XB provisional refuelers that Control directed two new flak boats, U-256 and U-271, to protect them and the even more valuable Type XIV tanker, U-488, at the refueling rendezvous. In addition, Control restricted all future refueling operations to nighttime, and directed that in event of an Allied air attack, the tankers were to submerge while the U-boats waiting to refuel repelled the aircraft with flak guns.
Taking advantage of Enigma decrypts and DFs of U-boat radio chatter, the Allies continued to focus hunter-killer operations against the U-tankers. While pursuing U-488, Avengers and Wildcats of the “jeep” carrier Core tangled with two U-boats.
• On October 20, pilots Charles W. Brewer and Robert W. Hayman came upon the VII U-378, commanded by Erich Mäder, who had earlier sunk the Polish destroyer Orkan. The pilots attacked and sank U-378. There was one survivor, the quartermaster Karl-Heinz Brunkhorst, but he was lost when the ship that saved him went down.*
• On the next day, October 21, aircraft from Core, assisted by Catalinas, found and attacked the flak boat U-271, commanded by Kurt Barleben, age thirty-four, who was seeking the tanker U-488 to offer protection. One German gunner was killed and others wounded, but U-271 survived the attack. However, she was so badly smashed up that Barleben had to abort to France.
To replace the failed group Schlieffen, on October 24 U-boat Control directed the formation of a new group, Siegfried. In its final configuration, Siegfried was comprised of eighteen U-boats. Of these, eleven, or almost two-thirds, were commanded by green skippers; six in new boats from Norway and five in experienced boats from France. Owing to the absence of U-tankers, Control was compelled to order Siegfried to attack eastbound convoys, thereby bringing the fuel-low U-boats closer to French bases, but also closer to the most effective Allied land-based air.
From timely Enigma decrypts, the Allies were aware of group Siegfried. To avoid this line, they diverted all eastbound Halifax and Slow convoys—those with valuable cargoes—to a southerly course. At the same time, Allied authorities designated the empty ships of convoy Outbound North 207 a “bait convoy,” and deliberately sent it directly at group Siegfried to seek a naval confrontation. For this purpose the Outbound North 207 was massively protected. The Canadian Escort Group C-l, the British “jeep” carrier Biter, which sailed inside the convoy, and a MAC ship provided close escort. The famous British Support Group B-2, commanded by Johnny Walker, to which the new British “jeep” carrier Tracker had been attached, patrolled nearby, as did Peter Gretton’s Support Group, B-7. Land-based Coastal Command aircraft of all types lent added support.
The battle commenced on the morning of October 23. A B-24 of British Squadron 224, en route to Gretton’s B-7 group to airdrop some radar spare parts, sighted a U-boat of group Siegfried. This was the new VII U-274, commanded by Günther Jordan, age twenty-four, ten days out from a fuel stop in Norway. The pilot, Edward Jacques (Billy) Wicht, a Swiss serving in the RAF, attacked with eight rockets, gave the alarm, and dropped a smoke float. Gretton in the destroyer Duncan accompanied by his other destroyer, Vidette, raced to the float, trailed by the slower corvettes. Meanwhile, Wicht drove the U-274 under with gunfire and dropped two depth charges.
Upon gaining a sonar contact, Duncan twice attacked U-274 with her Hedgehog and Vidette carried out a depth-charge run. These attacks destroyed the boat with the loss of all hands. The kill was confirmed by what Gretton described as “gruesome evidence” that rose to the surface. Johnny Walker, who had not yet got a U-boat kill this trip, radioed Gretton congratulations. “We were delighted to have wiped the eye for once of the leading expert in the Navy, who had forgotten more about ‘pinging’ than any of us had ever learnt,” Gretton wrote with modesty in his memoir. The British divided credit for the kill among Wicht’s B-24, Duncan, and Vidette.
Three days later, on October 26, one of eight B-24s of Canadian Squadron 10, based at Gander, Newfoundland, which came out to escort Outbound North 207, sighted another Siegfried boat. She was thought to be the VII U-420, commanded by Hans-Jürgen Reese, age twenty-five, which, in early July, had been badly damaged by aircraft of the same squadron. This second assault on the supposed U-420 was mounted by pilot R. M. Aldwinkle. On the first pass, five of six depth charges failed to explode and the other fell wide. On the second pass, after a brief gun duel, the U-boat dived and Aldwinkle dropped a Fido homing torpedo (called “Zombie” by Canadians), but it probably missed or malfunctioned. On a third pass, Aldwinkle dropped two more depth charges that exploded close to the U-boat. The Admiralty credited him with the kill of U-420, but Niestlé has concluded that the boat was lost to unknown causes.
Into this great congregation of Allied ships and aircraft in mid-Atlantic came two more American “jeep” carrier groups. The first was the Block Island, newly assigned to Atlantic ASW operations and equipped with long-range, radar-equipped, night-flying Avengers. The Block Island group relieved the “jeep” carrier Core and her screen. The second “jeep” carrier was the Card, which had resupplied in North Africa. The main mission of the Block Island and Card carrier groups was to sink the tanker U-488 and the XB provisional tankers U-219 and U-220.
The Block Island group DFed a refueling rendezvous of U-488, and other boats on the night of October 25-26. Two four-stack destroyers of the screen, Parrott and Paul Jones (both veterans of the Asiatic Fleet of 1942), found U-488, but they botched the attack and the harassed tanker got away. However, the boats seeking fuel from U-488 had to endure more days of anxiety.
That same day, October 26, a B-24 found and attacked the VII U-91, commanded by Heinz Hungershausen. Intercepting and decrypting a report of this attack by gunfire and depth charges, Allied codebreakers surmised that it probably was carried out by a B-24 of Canadian Squadron 10. The U-91, which had been out from France thirty-six days and was seeking the VII U-584 to give her fuel, was not seriously damaged.
Two days later, on the morning of October 28, two aircraft from Block Island found the XB provisional tanker U-220, commanded by Bruno Barber, and her flak-boat escort, U-256, commanded by Wilhelm Brauel. It was believed that Avenger pilot Franklin M. Murray and Wildcat pilot Harold L. Handshuh sank U-220 with the loss of all hands and so severely damaged U-256 that Brauel, like Barleben in the other flak boat, U-27I, was forced to abort to France. However, Niestlé writes that Brauel in JJ-256 logged an underwater telephone exchange with Barber eight hours later that day, which raises doubt about the kill of U-220 that morning.
On the next day, October 29, Peter Gretton’s Support Group B-7, which had switched from the “bait convoy” Outbound North 207 to the next convoy sailing west, Outbound North 208, found a shadower. She was the new VII U-282, commanded by Rudolf Müller, age twenty-six, who was merely ten days out from a fuel stop in Norway on his first patrol. The British destroyers Duncan and Vidette and corvette Sunflower of Gretton’s group sank U-282 by Hedgehog. “Even more gruesome and more numerous” evidence rose to the surface, Gretton wrote, confirming the kill, but there were no German survivors. After this victory—the group’s third kill in as many weeks—Gretton returned to the British Isles with the fast eastbound convoy Halifax 263.* U-boat Control did not learn of the loss of U-282 for weeks.
Hunting the XIV tanker U-488 and/or the XB provisional tanker U-219, the Card group got good Huff Duff bearings on October 30-31. As it turned out, the prey was neither U-488 nor U-219, both of which had run south to less hostile waters, but rather the VII U-584, commanded by Joachim Deecke (who had landed four saboteurs in Florida in June 1942) and the U-91, commanded by Heinz Hungershausen, which was to give U-584 some fuel to get home.
Late on the afternoon of October 31, Avenger pilot Wilma S. Fowler from Card found U-584 and U-91. In response to his alarm, two other Card Avengers, piloted by Letson S. Balliett and Alexander C. McAuslan, soon arrived. After putting up desultory flak, Hungershausen in U-91 dived and escaped. Left alone, Deecke in U-584 also dived, but too late. Avenger pilots Fowler and Balliett dropped Fidos that hit and destroyed U-584 with the loss of all hands.
Wrongly assuming Hungershausen in U-91 to be a U-tanker, the commander of the Card group, Arnold J. (“Buster”) Isbell, was more than annoyed that she got away. He therefore sent one of his screen, the four-stack destroyer Borie, commanded by thirty-year-old Charles H. Hutchins, in pursuit. In the early hours of November 1, Hutchins got a radar contact. It was not U-91 but rather a veteran of the Arctic, U-405, commanded by Rolf-Heinrich Hopmann, who was a ripe thirty-seven years old and thirsting for a fight.
The battle that ensued over the next hour and twelve minutes was one of the closest and most intense of the Atlantic naval war. When Borie closed, guns blazing, U-405 dived. Owing to a defect in Borie’s depth-charge racks, Hutchins unintendedly unleashed a monstrous barrage on Hopmann. The impact of these close explosions blew U-405 to the surface, whereupon Borie attempted to ram. However, the motion of the heavy seas thwarted Borie and she came down on U-405’s bow section very gently and hung up. Locked in a deadly V, the opposing crews shot at one another at extreme close quarters. The exposed Germans incurred very heavy casualties. The grinding of the vessels opened deep gashes in Borie’s hull but not that of U-405.
When the two ships separated, they each shot a torpedo at the other, but both missed. Thereupon Hutchins outmaneuvered Hopmann and gained an advantageous position that enabled him to fire three shallow-set depth charges from his throwers in a good straddle. These explosions and two solid hits on U-405’s bridge by Borie’s 4” guns fatally holed the U-boat. About twenty surviving Germans threw dinghies over the side and jumped into the sea. In a maneuver reminiscent of that of the American destroyer Roper’s toward the survivors of U-85, Hutchins, believing Borie was threatened by another U-boat, plowed through the Germans in the water and hauled away, leaving the few who survived to fend for themselves. None lived.
The story was not yet over. The entanglement with U-405 had flooded Borie’s engine rooms. In reporting his victory to Buster Isbell in Card, Hutchins added: “May have to abandon ship.” However, this message was garbled and Card did not realize Borie was in serious trouble until Hutchins radioed: “Commenced sinking.” Six hours later Hutchins ordered his crew to abandon ship. Bedeviled by fog, the Card group was slow to mount a rescue and twenty-seven of Borie’s crew died in the water. Finally, the four-stack destroyers Barry and Goff rescued 127 Borie survivors. The Barry and an Avenger sank the abandoned hulk on November 2. Hutchins, his senior engineer Morrison R. Brown, and a machinist, Irving R. Saum, Jr., each won a Navy Cross for this battle and for keeping the damaged Borie afloat for as long as possible.
The inability of B-dienst and the Luftwaffe to provide precise information on Allied convoys in October and the apparent ability of the Allies to locate and avoid U-boat patrol lines led Dönitz and U-boat Control to make several important tactical changes. Notwithstanding the upgrades, the standard group or “wolf pack” U-boat operations versus convoys were finally deemed to be no longer feasible. The U-boat campaign against the North Atlantic run was to continue but the boats waging it were to be much more widely deployed in a variety of experimental formations and to remain fully submerged in daytime to avoid detection. Owing to the inadequacy of the Wanze radar detector and the quad and twin 20mm flak guns, the “fight back” policy against Allied aircraft was rescinded until all boats could be fitted with the rapid-fire 37mm gun and the new Naxos radar detectors, which could detect centimetric-wavelength radar. On November 11, Control ordered that the eight flak U-boats be reconverted to normal boats. All U-boats were to remain submerged at all times in daytime to hide from enemy aircraft and attack enemy ships only at night.
The result was a dispersion of the boats on the North Atlantic run in November and thereafter. First, the boats of the luckless group Siegfried were divided into three subgroups {Siegfried 1 to 3), then into two large subgroups (John and Korner), then into five subgroups (Tirpitz 1 to 5), and then, finally, into ten subgroups (Eisenhart 1 to 10). Aware from Enigma decrypts of these dispersions, Allied authorities routed convoys around the U-boats or took advantage of harsh winter weather and poor visibility to sail right through some of the thinly manned lines.
The destruction of U-boats on the North Atlantic run tapered off sharply in the month of November. On November 6, Johnny Walker’s British Support Group 2— five sloops plus the “jeep” carrier Tracker—sank two:
• In the early hours of that day, the sloop Kite, commanded by W.E.R. Sea-grave, got a radar contact on U-226, a VII of Tirpitz 4 from France, commanded by a new skipper, Albrecht Gange, age twenty-four. Kite fired star shells and depth charges, forcing Gange to dive. Meanwhile, Walker in the sloop Starling and C. Gwinner in the sloop Woodcock raced up to help Kite. In a dogged hunt, the three sloops trapped and sank U-226. There were no survivors.
• Responding to a Huff Duff contact a few hours later, a Swordfish from Tracker found and drove under the new IXC40 U-842 of Tirpitz 5, commanded by Wolfgang Heller, age thirty-three, who, contrary to new and specific orders, was running on the surface in daylight. Walker in Starling raced to the scene with the sloops Magpie and Wild Goose. Directing the three sloops, Walker soon trapped and sank U-842 with the loss of all hands. The kill was confirmed with the recovery of “human remains” and wreckage. Starling and Wild Goose, commanded by D.E.G. Wemyss, got credit for the kill.
Thereafter Walker’s support group and Tracker encountered severe winter gales and mountainous seas. In such foul conditions, Walker deemed Tracker more trouble than she was worth. She could not launch aircraft, and Walker had constantly to screen her from U-boat attack. Furthermore, Walker reported on arrival in Argentia on November 12 that his sloops were not built stoutly enough. All had suffered heavy sea damage, Woodcock so much so that she had to return to England in noncombatant status with an eastbound convoy.
Walker’s deep concerns about screening Tracker were not unfounded. On November 8, the U-648, SL VII of subgroup Tirpitz 5 commanded by Peter-Arthur Stahl, came upon Tracker and fired three torpedoes at her from a range of two thousand yards. These torpedoes missed, as did a T-5 Zaunkönig (Wren) homing torpedo that Stahl fired at Starling or another of Walker’s sloops. Tracker and her screen escaped behind a smoke screen and rain squalls, but the incident was too close for comfort.
Land-based aircraft accounted for three other boats in November:
• The new VII U-966, commanded by Eckehard Wolf, age twenty-five, which sailed from Trondheim on October 5. While inbound to France via the northern Spanish coast in the early hours of November 10, a Leigh Light-equipped Wellington of British Squadron 612, piloted by Ian D. Gunn, found and attacked U-966, dropping six depth charges, all of which fell short. After an exchange of gunfire, U-966 dived.
Later that morning, a B-24 of American Navy Squadron VB 103, piloted by Kenneth L. Wright, found U-966 near El Ferrol. Wright made two attacks, dropping six depth charges and killing some Germans by gunfire. A B-24 of U.S. Navy Squadron VB 105, piloted by Leonard E. Harmon, joined the attack. Soon there arrived yet another B-24 of American Navy Squadron VB 110 piloted by J. A. Parrish, who dropped six close depth charges in spite of the heavy flak. Lastly, a B-24 of Czech Squadron 311, piloted by Otakar Zanta, attacked U-966 with rockets about three miles off the Spanish coast.
These attacks killed eight Germans and wrecked the boat. Wolf ran her aground off Punta Estaca, then blew her up. He and forty-one other Germans reached shore in dinghies. The Spanish authorities allowed nine crewmen to be repatriated to Germany but interned thirty-three others for the duration of the war.*
• The veteran IXC U-508, commanded by Ritterkreuz holder Georg Staats, which sailed from St. Nazaire to the North Atlantic on November 9. On the fourth day, November 12, Control logged, Staats reported that he was under attack by an aircraft. American naval authorities concluded that the attack had been carried out by a B-24 of American Navy Squadron VB 103, piloted by Ralph B. Brownell, who reported a U-boat contact at that time but failed to return to the new Fleet Air Wing 7 base in southwest England at; Dunkeswell. It was assumed that while carrying out the attack, the U-508 shot down Brownell’s B-24 with the loss of all hands, then was herself sunk by the B-24’s depth charges. The Navy awarded Brownell a posthumous Navy Cross, his copilot and navigator the DFC, and seven other crewmen the Air Medal.
• The new VII U-280, commanded by Walter Hungershausen, which had been assigned to the Tirpitz and Eisenhart groups. On November 16, a B-24 of British Squadron 86, piloted by an Australian, John H. Bookless, attacked U-280 with depth charges through intense flak that knocked out the outer engine on the port wing. The depth charges fell wide but on a second run, the depth-charge salvo fell close and the B-24 nose gunner raked the German gunners on the bridge and bandstands. Hungershausen got off an attack report to Control, but nothing further was heard from the boat. She most likely sank with the loss of all hands as a result of this attack.
Allied aircraft hit three other U-boats on the North Atlantic run in November, but all survived.
• On November 5, an unidentified aircraft attacked the new VII U-967, commanded by Herbert Loeder, age twenty-four. While inbound in the Bay of Biscay on November 30, the boat was again hit by an aircraft, also unidentified. She did not sail again until January 20, 1944.
• On November 8, an unidentified aircraft attacked the new U-714, commanded by Hans-Joachim Schwebcke, age twenty-five. The boat reported “no damage” and went on to complete a full patrol of fifty-one days.
• On November 15, an unidentified aircraft attacked the experienced U-709, commanded by Karl-Otto Weber. He, too, reported no damage and completed a full patrol of fifty-four days.
By early December, eleven new boats from Germany and three from the Arctic † had reinforced the Atlantic force. Control formed these boats, plus three from France and two others into group Coronel, which in turn was divided into three subgroups {Coronel 1, 2, and 3). Allied ASW forces hit one of the boats, the Arctic transfer U-269, commanded by Karl-Heinrich Harlfinger, age twenty-eight, inflicting such “extensive damage” that Harlfinger was forced to abort. That withdrawal left Coronel at a strength of eighteen boats.
Group Coronel represented in part a sort of “second wave” in the renewed campaign on the North Atlantic run. In conformity with orders from Dönitz, no boats could sail from France after December 1 or Germany after December 10 without the new 37mm flak gun and the new Naxos radar detector.* All boats carried T-5 homing torpedoes, but owing to lagging production of that weapon, boats of the Atlantic force were issued only four per patrol. †
At this time there was only one Type XIV U-tanker left in the Atlantic force, Bartke’s U-488. One other Type XIV, U-490, had been built but owing to her accidental sinking during workup, she was still in the Baltic. Bartke in U-488 was “sold out” and homebound to France for refit and Christmas leave. Therefore in the first half of December, only a provisional tanker, the XB minelayer U-219, was available to assist the VIIs of group Coronel and none at all in the second half of the month. As a result, Coronel was held to areas merely five hundred miles west of Ireland, well within range of Coastal Command’s heaviest concentration of ASW aircraft.
The three Coronel groups took up positions in stormy winter weather, but the Allies knew their positions from Enigma decrypts and with great success diverted the convoys to avoid them. By German reckoning, three convoys that they had specifically targeted evaded the U-boats: Outbound North (Slow) 24, Outbound North 215, and the eastbound Halifax 268. Two Coronel boats incurred severe mechanical problems:
• On December 16, heavy seas caused so much damage to the VII U-284, commanded by Günther Scholz, age twenty-four, that he was forced to abort and call for help. When the Arctic transfer U-629, commanded by Hans-Helmut Bugs, answered the call on December 21, Scholz put his crew on U-629 and scuttled the wrecked U-284, Inbound to France on December 29 with about one hundred men on board, Bugs came upon a “small” convoy and shot a T-5 at a “destroyer.” He claimed it sank, but the claim was not confirmed.
• On December 17, the new VII U-761, commanded by Horst Geider,* age twenty-five, had an explosion in the forward battery. No one was seriously injured in the blast, but the new engineering officer, Karl Lendle, declared that battery unusable and U-761 had to abort. She limped into Brest on December 26.
After two futile weeks, Control dissolved the three Coronel lines and replaced them with three other lines, each of six boats: Sylt, Amrum, and Fohr. Owing to the mountainous seas, the boats were unable to use flak arrays, so Control directed these boats to remain submerged in daytime. Thus immobilized, their search capability was vastly limited and they could not find convoys which, in any case, were diverted south to avoid the boats and the terrible weather.
Having achieved nothing with these three new patrol lines, on December 22, Control dispersed the boats even more widely. It divided the eighteen boats of the three groups into six groups of three boats each, Rügen 1 to 6. The next day, one of the Rügen boats, the new U-471, commanded by Friedrich Kloevekorn, age twenty-five, came upon a troop or military, convoy, TU 5, en route from the British Isles to the States. This convoy was massively escorted by the battleship Nevada, which had survived the Pearl Harbor attack, and other warships. Kloevekorn boldly attacked alone on December 23 and claimed a hit on an 8,000-ton freighter, but, in actuality, he missed. An unidentified British B-24 escorting the convoy sighted and bombed U-471, wounding three men and inflicting “serious damage,” but Kloevekorn was able to doctor the wounded, make repairs, and continue the patrol.
Another Rügen boat, the new U-392, commanded by Henning Schumann, age twenty-four, found a convoy on the day after Christmas. It was Halifax 271 (fifty-four ships, eight escorts) partly scattered by heavy weather. Mistakenly reporting the formation as merely “three or four freighters” with a light escort, Schumann attacked with three FATs. One broached and prematured, he reported. One hit a destroyer “under the bridge,” and the third may have hit a freighter. None of the hits was confirmed. The destroyers and other escorts of the convoy drove U-392 down, and the convoy escaped with no damage.
On the penultimate day of December, two Rügen boats came upon separate elements of convoy Outbound North 217 (eighty ships, nine escorts) that had been scattered in a storm. Gert Mannesmann, age thirty-three, in the new IXC40 U-545, reported fifteen merchantmen. He fired four FATs and claimed four hits that sank one freighter, the 7,400-ton British Empire Housman, and damaged two freighters for 12,000 tons. However, he only damaged the Empire Housman and no other hits were confirmed. Heinz Blischke, age twenty-four, in the new VII U-744, came upon a single, straggling freighter and shot seven torpedoes at her, including one T-5, but all missed or malfunctioned. A few days later Blischke came upon the damaged Empire Housman and sank her, to share credit with Mannesmann, who further claimed a “destroyer” and another freighter, but these were never confirmed. The Allies made an effort to salvage Empire Housman, but it was futile. She was the only merchant ship sunk by U-boats on the North Atlantic run in December.
Owing to a decision by Hitler to resume Luftwaffe raids on London at the end of December, Dönitz diverted two VIIs and a IX from Rugen to weather-reporting duties. Because of the great increase in Allied carrier and land-based air patrols, this special duty was extremely hazardous. All three boats survived this assignment, but the IXC40 U-544 was later sunk while trying to refuel two boats inbound from the Americas, as will be described.
At the end of the year, Dönitz issued a new order (No. 34) that radically modified the way U-boats were to attack convoys. Inasmuch as the radar of Allied air and sonar of surface escorts had made convoy attacks so very difficult, U-boats, upon gaining contact with a convoy were henceforth to shoot FATS and T-5s “blind” from submerged positions without any use of the periscope. All five (or six) tubes were to be emptied in the attack. After firing, the U-boats were to descend at least to 131 feet to avoid the possibility of a looping FAT hitting the boat.
This order effectively ended the so-called wolf pack or group tactics whereby a U-boat in contact with a convoy would call up or home in other U-boats. By firing blind and going deep to evade looping FATS and to reload, the U-boat was almost certain to lose contact with the convoy fairly quickly, and especially so if the convoy made a radical course change upon detecting the torpedoes, as was customary. Under this set of circumstances, the U-boat could not report the convoy course and speed reliably and consistently enough for Control to send in other boats, which were already more widely scattered than ever.
The resumption of U-boat operations against Allied shipping on the North Atlantic run in the four months from September through December 1943 proved to be another futile gesture. In 101 patrols mounted to that area during those four months, U-boats caused the loss of only fourteen vessels: six escorts and eight freighters. In turn, forty-nine U-boats*—and about 2,450 men—had been lost and twenty-two other boats were compelled to abort, most of them with battle damage and casualties inflicted by aircraft.
All the new and supposedly war-decisive weapons—the Wanze and Naxos radar detectors, the Aphrodite radar decoy, surface-search radar (Gema and Hohentwiel) and direction-finding gear, the T-5 Zaunkönig (Wren) homing torpedo, the quad and twin 20mm flak guns—proved to be wanting, and in some cases, worthless. Except for U-488 and U-490 (still in the Baltic), the Type XIV U-tankers had been wiped out. The Luftwaffe had failed to find and report convoys. The price for continuing the U-boat campaign on the North Atlantic ran was so high that Dönitz again ordered Control to cancel group operations and to scatter the boats at sea, singly, west of the British Isles and to shoot “blind,” while submerged, as instructed.
At the close of 1943, Washington, London, and Ottawa happily agreed to a cautious statement, to be released early in 1944, that significantly degraded the U-boat threat:
Total merchant shipping tonnage lost by U-boat action in December was again low.* Despite an extension of operating areas, fewer U-boats were destroyed during the month by our air and sea forces owing to several factors, including increased caution by the enemy. Our supply routes were, however, well secured against U-boat attack.
In 1943 U-boats sank but 40 percent of the merchant ship tonnage that they sank in 1942. On the other hand, United Nations merchant ship tonnage constructed in 1943 approximately doubled the tonnage delivered in 1942. Nearly half of our tonnage lost for :he year 1943 was during the first three months: 27 percent was lost during the second quarter of 1943, and only 26 percent was lost during the last six months.
The Anglo-Portuguese Agreement of August 18, 1943, opened the way for the British to establish airfields in the Azores on Faial and Terceira islands. On October 3, a naval task force departed the British Isles to carry out Alacrity, the first phase of the mission. It included the “jeep” carrier Fencer, three destroyers, and the troopship Franconia, crowded with RAF ground crews. The commander of Coastal Command’s 19 Group, Geoffrey Bromet, went along to make certain this delicate diplomatic maneuver proceeded according to plan.
The task force sighted Terceira Island on October 8. Fencer launched Seafire aircraft (a carrier version of the Spitfire) to patrol for hostile forces. The destroyers ran hither and yon searching for U-boats that might attempt to interfere. All went smoothly. Before nightfall, Bromet and other RAF personnel flew in Walrus seaplanes to the island capital, Angra do Heroismo.
This smooth operation suddenly went haywire. Unfavorable weather in the British Isles grounded the land-based bomber squadrons that were to base in the Azores. As a temporary stopgap, the Admiralty directed the Seafires and Swordfish on Fencer to fly ashore to establish a British presence at Lagens airport. Finally, on October 18, the first British land-based bomber, a B-17 Flying Fortress, arrived at Lagens. On October 24, Fencer collected her Seafires and Swordfish and sailed back to the British Isles to escort KM and MK convoys.
Within the next week or two, about fifty British aircraft arrived in the Azores. These were thirty B-17s of British Squadrons 206 and 220, formerly based in the Hebrides, ten Hudsons of British Squadron 233 from Gibraltar, and six Leigh Light-equipped Wellingtons, part of British Squadron 179, also from Gibraltar. In the ensuing months, more and more Allied aircraft arrived, necessitating another airfield.
The importance of these new Allied air bases to the Battle of the Atlantic cannot be overstressed. For the British (and later, the Americans), the Azores became in the Middle Atlantic what Iceland was to the North Atlantic. The land-based ASW aircraft operating from the Azores closed the Middle Atlantic “Air Gap,” extending the convoy air umbrella eastward toward North Africa, westward toward Argentia and Bermuda, northward toward Iceland, and southward toward the Cape Verde Islands and Dakar.
Owing to the heavy Allied air cover provided to the KM-MK convoys proceeding between the British Isles and the Mediterranean, the Germans had not conducted group operations against them since June 1942. With the arrival in France of new Luftwaffe aircraft (JU-88s, HE-177s, JU-290s, BV-222s) and the loss of all but one U-tanker, Dönitz and Control deployed group Schill 1 against this convoy route. The group had what was considered to be the advantage of being close to French bases, thus reducing the need for refueling and profiting from the convoy-spotting by the Luftwaffe,
To avoid detection before its first strike, Schill 1 was deliberately kept small. It was composed initially of only eight boats, including the flak boats U-211, U-441, and U-953. Early in the deployment, unidentified Allied aircraft hit and severely damaged the U-441, commanded by Klaus Hartmann. Unable to make necessary repairs, Hartmann aborted to France.
The seven remaining boats of Schill 1 deployed west of Portugal to intercept the northbound convoy MKS 28, which was merged with the northbound convoy Sierra Leone 138, altogether sixty merchant ships. The two convoys were protected by British Escort Group 39, comprised of ten warships: two destroyers (Whitehall, Wrestler), three sloops (Hastings, Rochester, Scarborough), a frigate (Tavy), three corvettes, and, for protection against German aircraft, the antiaircraft light cruiser Alynbank.
A Luftwaffe BV-222 aircraft found and reported this large formation on October 27 but lost it over the next two days. However, Heinz Franke in U-262 located and tracked the convoy on October 29 and 30 and brought up other boats, including Ritterkreuz holder Peter Cremer in U-333. Franke and Cremer attacked and both claimed a “destroyer” sunk, but neither claim has been confirmed. In addition, Franke claimed that he sank a 7,000-ton freighter, which proved to be the 3,000-ton Norwegian Hallfried, only the third freighter to be sunk by U-boats in the whole of the North Atlantic in the month of October.
During the action on October 31, two of the British escorts, the destroyer White-hall and the corvette Geranium, found and sank by Hedgehog and depth charges one of the Schill 1 boats. She was the U-306, commanded by Claus von Trotha. The British confirmed the kill by fishing out “splintered woodwork5’ of the type known to be used in the interior of the VIIs. No survivors or bodies were found.
In order to maintain group Schill 1 at a strength of eight boats, U-boat Control directed two VIIs newly sailed from France to replace the lost U-306 and the aborting flak boat, U-441. The group, which still included the flak boats U-211 and U-953, then redeployed to intercept a KMS convoy southbound to Gibraltar.
Luftwaffe aircraft scouted for the convoy on November 2, 3, and 4, but they had no luck. However, on the night of November 4, Ritterkreuz holder Peter Cremer in U-333 got a hydrophone contact and surfaced in “thick” fog. Suddenly, he wrote, “distorted by the shifting veil of the fog, disjointed and growing to gigantic size, hulls, masts and funnels came into view.” But before he could prepare and send a contact report, a “destroyer” loomed out of the fog, bearing down on U-333. Cremer shot a T-5 at the “destroyer” by eye and dived to 590 feet, but the torpedo missed or malfunctioned and the “destroyer” pounded U-333 with “a rain of depth charges.”
The U-333 survived, but Cremer remained submerged during the daylight hours, delaying his contact report for about eighteen hours. U-boat Control was furious. Not only had Cremer delayed his contact report, the diarist logged, but also he had failed to include a location. His lapses were “incomprehensible,” the diarist admonished. Because of the delay, operations against this convoy could not be mounted.
Luftwaffe aircraft scouted for and found the expected northbound convoy, MKS 29, on November 7. U-boat Control shifted Schill 1 to intercept it but, as usual, the location given by the airmen was in error and the convoy sailed undetected through the U-boat line on the night of November 8. It was just like earlier days, the U-boat Control diarist complained. There were not enough aircraft in working order and the aircrews were not sufficiently trained in over-water navigation.
The luck of the Luftwaffe changed on November 9. Aircraft located northbound convoy MKS 29 in time to shift Schill 1, less the low on fuel, homebound flak boat U-953, to a promising position. After dark Heinz Franke in U-262 reported “lights,” brought up several of the boats, then attacked. Franke and another skipper, Gerhard Thater in U-466, claimed hits on “destroyers” but none of the claims was confirmed. Erwin Christophersen in U-228 claimed sinking a 5,000-ton freighter, but that claim was not confirmed either. The convoy escaped with no losses.
Allied ASW forces knocked out two of the remaining seven boats of Schill 1. Near dawn on November 9, a’B-17-of British Squadron 220, newly arrived at the British base in the Azores, found the U-707, commanded by Günter Gretschel, age twenty-nine. Flying into “heavy and accurate” flak, pilot Roderick Patrick Drummond made two low-level passes and dropped seven shallow-set depth charges that destroyed the U-boat. Drummond reported that his crew saw “ten to fifteen” Germans in the water, swimming amid “wooden wreckage,” and that he dropped them two dinghies and rations. Another B-17 of British Squadron 220, piloted by G. P. Robertson, arrived to find only one German in the water. Robertson dropped him supply packs and radios but the Allies recovered no one from U-707. In an unrelated action, surface-ship escorts of the convoy counterattacked Thater in U-466 and inflicted so much damage that he was forced to abort to France in the wake of the flak boat U-953.
At about this time, German intelligence reported the presence of a big northbound Allied formation. This was convoy MKS 30, merged with convoy Sierra Leone 139, altogether sixty-six merchant ships. Protection for these merged convoys was massive: twenty warships (two destroyers, five sloops, seven frigates, six corvettes) of escort groups 5, 7, and 40, plus the British armed merchant cruiser Ranpura and the Canadian antiaircraft merchant cruiser Prince Robert. In addition, Coastal Command B-24s and Wellingtons of British Squadrons 53 and 179, B-17s of British Squadrons 206 and 220 in the Azores, and Sunderlands of Canadian Squadron 422 provided saturation air cover.
The Germans were determined to strike a heavy blow at these convoys. To make certain of success, U-boat Control deployed three patrol lines from south to north, altogether about thirty U-boats.
• The southernmost line, Schill 1, was composed of seven boats, including the remaining flak boat, U-211; the U-333, commanded by Ritterkreuz holder Peter Cremer; and, temporarily, the newly sailed IXC US 15, commanded by Werner Henke, who wore Oak Leaves on his Ritterkreuz. Two other boats returning from operations on the North Atlantic run, U-426 and U-608, were assigned to Schill 1, but they could not get that far south in time.
• The next line farther north, Schill 2, was composed of ten boats; six returning from the North Atlantic run,* including the U-608; one, the IXC40 US36, returning from the aborted POW pickup in Canada; and three boats newly sailed from France. The U-426, returning from the North Atlantic run, was given freedom to operate independently near Schill 2.
• The third and most northerly line, Schill 3, was composed of twelve boats returning from the North Atlantic run. Two other boats low on fuel from the North Atlantic ran, U-91 and US52, were encouraged to join Schill 3 if at all possible.
While en route to join Schill 3, the new IXC40 US42, recently sailed from Norway, found a group of “destroyers” on November 16. The U-boat skipper, Christian-Brandt Coester, age twenty-four, boldly shot a T-5 homing torpedo at one of them, but it did not hit. The “destroyers” and a “Hudson” aircraft counterattacked US42 but Coester shot back with a second T-5. It prematured, but he eluded the hunters. When another new boat, the U-969, commanded by Max Dobbert, age thirty-three, en route to Schill 2, reported a “destroyer” from about the same area, Control speculated that these boats had probably encountered the screen of an east-bound convoy, perhaps Halifax 265 or Slow Convoy 146. However, the supposed convoy was already too close to the British Isles to mount a U-boat attack.
Luftwaffe aircraft found the merged northbound convoys MKS 30 and Sierra Leone 139 on November 16. U-boat Control shifted Schill 1 easterly to intercept it submerged at about midday on November 18. The dogged spotter and tracker Heinz Franke, in U-262, found the convoy. He and Ritterkreuz holders Cremer in U-333 and Henke in U-515 led the attack.
Cremer wrote in his memoir that “chance would have it that U-333 was the first boat to intercept the enemy.” The result was disastrous. The British frigate Exe, one other warship, and an aircraft spotted U-333’s periscope almost simultaneously and pounced. “A pattern of ten depth charges exploded with a deafening roar round the boat,” Cremer continued, and “the effect was terrible ... [and the] damage [was] very great.” Moreover, Exe’s keel hit U-333’s periscope and broke it off. Exe and other escorts then depth-charged U-333 for eight hours. By what was deemed a miracle, U-333 survived her third collision with Allied vessels, aborted, and limped home.
Henke in U-515 hit the 1,350-ton British sloop Chanticleer with a T-5 and blew off her stern. However, the sloop survived and a tug later towed her to the Azores. Other air and surface escorts, including notably the British sloop Crane, quickly found and aggressively attacked U-515 and savaged the boat. The chief engineer, Georg Mahnken, urged Henke to return to France for repairs. Mahnken’s understudy, Günther Alterburger, who had made twelve war patrols on other boats, believed the crew could repair the boat at sea. Always willing to “take a chance,” as Allied intelligence put it, Henke proceeded to an isolated area in the Canary Islands. After rigging a camouflage net, the crew repaired the extensive topside damage and Henke took U-515 on to Freetown.
Yet another Schill 1 boat was lost in this attack, the flak boat U-211, commanded by Karl Hause, age twenty-seven. A Leigh Light-equipped Wellington of the Azores-based British Squadron 179, piloted by the Canadian Donald F. McRae, who had earlier sunk U-134 and forced U-760 into internment in Spain, found U-211 by radar and then by sight in the moonlight. In the belief that his chances of success were better if he did not use his Leigh Light, McRae achieved complete surprise and sank U-211 with a nearly perfect straddle of four depth charges. There were no survivors.
The air and surface escorts of this convoy formation simply overwhelmed the U-boats of Schill 1. When it realized this, Control canceled the operations of Schill 1 and repositioned the next northerly line, Schill 2, for the second assault. Owing in large part to a massive air escort (seven Leigh Light-equipped Wellingtons the night of November 19-20, twelve B-17s and B-24s during the day on November 20), Schill 2 was unable to assemble and crack through. However, two boats of Schill 2 shot down Allied aircraft. The U-618, commanded by Kurt Baberg, got a Sunderland of Canadian Squadron 422. The U-648, commanded by Peter-Arthur Stahl, who had earlier shot at the “jeep” carrier Tracker but missed, and had been hit by an aircraft on November 18, got a B-24 of British Squadron 53.
Over the next several days, from November 20 to 23, boats of Schill 2 and Schill 3 attempted to break through the massive screen and attack the merchant ships, but none succeeded. The Luftwaffe inflicted the only damage to merchant ships of this convoy formation. That damage was slight, but the way it was done was innovative and startling.
Late on the afternoon of November 21, when it was likely that its air escorts had returned to bases, the Luftwaffe sent off a special force of twenty-five four-engine HE-177 bombers to attack the convoy. The Heinkel bombers were unsatisfactory planes, but each was armed with two HS 293 radio-controlled “smart bombs.” At a range of about eight hundred miles from their base, twenty of the twenty-five HE-177s found the convoy and dropped (or “flew”) forty bombs at various ships from an altitude of 1,300 to two thousand feet. Eleven bombs failed to detonate and almost all the others missed, but the Germans hit two merchant ships, Marsa and Delius. The former sank; the latter survived and reached port.
The Kriegsrnarine concluded that this special Luftwaffe operation, mounted at high cost and with great expectations, was a flop. The “poor results,” the OKM diarist logged, were due mainly to the lack of training of the aircrews. Of the five HE-177s (with ten glider-bombs) that failed to reach the convoy, three were lost and two developed engine problems and aborted. Following this fiasco, the OKM transferred the outfit to the Mediterranean theater.
Apart from continuing saturation air escort, the Allies reinforced the nineteen surface escorts of the convoy formation with British Support Group 4, which, as related, was comprised of six new, American-built frigates. This group increased the surface escort to twenty-five warships. The surface escorts sank three Schill U-boats:
• On November 20, the frigate Nene and two Canadian corvettes, Calgary and Snowberry, of Canadian Support Group 5 (commanded by a Britisher), found the IXC40 U-536, newly arrived from the failed POW pickup in Canada. The three warships attacked U-536 and blew her to the surface with depth charges. Nene sent a boarding party to capture the boat or its secret documents, but she sank before anything could be done. Nene and another British frigate, Tweed, rescued the skipper, Rolf Schauenburg, and sixteen other Germans.
• On November 21, the sloop Crane and the frigate Foley of British Support Group 7 found the new IXC40 U-538 of Schill 3, commanded by Hans-Egbert Gossler, age twenty-nine. In a notable display of teamwork, the two warships destroyed U-538 with depth-charge salvos. There were no survivors.
• On November 23, three of the new frigates of British Support Group 4, Bazely, Blackwood, and Brury, found what was thought to be the U-648, commanded by Peter-Arthur Stahl. In another notable display of teamwork, the three warships trapped the U-boat and pummeled her with depth charges. In wartime, the Admiralty credited these ships with the kill of U-648, but Niestlé writes that the cause of her loss is unknown.
So ended operations of the three Schill groups. Of the approximately thirty U-boats that had been deployed against the two merged convoys, only one boat achieved anything: Henke in U-515 blew off the stem of the British sloop Chanticleer, which made port in the Azores but was not repaired. In return, Allied forces had sunk six Schill boats (U-211, U-306, U-536, U-538, U-648, U-707) with the loss of about three hundred men (seventeen, from U-536, were captured). Three Schill boats (U-333, U-441, U-466) aborted to France with severe damage and/or personnel casualties.
Control reshuffled the three Schill groups into a new patrol line on November 23. This was Weddigen, to be composed of seventeen boats, or so it was believed. Actually, the Allies had sunk two of these (U-538 and U-648), leaving only fifteen, and the IXC U-515, commanded by Werner Henke, had hauled away to repair damage and resumed her voyage to Freetown. Yet another, U-586, low on fuel, had to depart for home the following day, reducing group Weddigen to thirteen boats, several also quite low on fuel.
The Weddigen group included the bold and indefatigable Heinz Franke in U-262 from the first Schill group, who continued to scout out and report convoys with exceptional valor and skill. On the late afternoon of November 26, when the Luftwaffe reported a big convoy—the merged MKS 31 and Sierra Leone 140—Franke put on full speed. Despite a radical course change by the convoy, the Luftwaffe relocated it on November 27. Thereupon Franke eluded depth-charging escorts, cannily positioned his boat, and surfaced at night in the middle of the convoy, like a latter-day Otto Kretschmer. He shot three T-5s and claimed that he sank three 5,000-ton freighters, but these sinkings were not confirmed.
Two other Weddigen boats got close enough to shoot T-5s at escorts. One was the new VII U-764, commanded by Hans-Kurt von Bremen, age twenty-five. The other was the aged IXB U-107, commanded by Volker von Simmermacher. Von Bremen claimed a sinking, von Simmermacher claimed a hit for damage, but neither hit was confirmed.
The recently arrived U-238, commanded by that fall’s top scorer, Horst Hepp, saw two Allied aircraft crash in flames. Hepp rescued two British airmen and sent off a long (and useless) report on his interrogation of them, which the Allies DFed. Control ordered Hepp to rendezvous with von Bremen’s homebound, low on fuel U-764 on November 30 and turn over the airmen to that boat.
Allied codebreakers and Huff Duff experts provided good information on this rendezvous. Land-based aircraft and the Bogue hunter-killer group went out to break up the party and—hopefully—rescue the British airmen. On November 29, von Bremen reported that four land-based aircraft attacked the U-764 and destroyers hunted him for sixteen hours before he escaped and continued to France. On November 30, Hepp reported that three (Bogue) aircraft hit the U-238, killing two men and wounding five others, including Hepp. Navy pilots James E. Ogle III, Carter E. Fetsch, and others carried out this attack; but Hepp, too, got away and aborted to France, still holding the two British airmen.
When Dönitz learned of the fine convoy shadowing carried out by Franke in U-262 and of his attack in the middle of the merged convoys MKS 31 and SL 140, he immediately recommended to Hitler that Franke be awarded a Ritterkreuz, the only North Atlantic skipper to be so honored in the fall of 1943.* Dönitz then sent a pointed message to all U-boat commands and vessels:
The Führer, acting on my suggestion, has awarded Lieutenant Franke a Ritterkreuz. One of the determining reasons was that Franke has repeatedly been the only one of those participating in an operation who has forced his way to the convoy against strongest air and sea defenses. In the present situation the prospects for sinkings are slight. In awarding distinctions I shall evaluate toughness and tenacity so much the more, even if they are not crowned with success.
Allied forces sank three of the Weddigen boats:
• On November 25, the team of frigates Bazely and Blackwood of British Support Group 4 found the veteran U-600, commanded by Bernhard Zurmtihlen, age thirty-four. In another well-executed attack with depth charges and Hedgehogs, the frigates destroyed U-600. There were no survivors.
• On the night of November 26, a Leigh Light-equipped Wellington of the Azores-based British Squadron 179 piloted by Donald M. Cornish found the new IXC40 U-542, commanded by Christian-Brandt Coester. As will be described, Cornish and his crew had earlier sunk U-431 and forced U-566 to scuttle. Flying into heavy flak, Cornish dropped six depth charges that destroyed U-542, his third U-boat kill. There were no survivors.
• On the afternoon of November 29, an Avenger from the “jeep” carrier Bogue, piloted by Bernard H. Volm, Jr., found what was thought to be the VIIB U-86—the oldest attack boat in the Atlantic force—commanded by the veteran Walter Schug. Volm radioed an alarm that brought in three more Bogue aircraft. An experienced Avenger pilot, Harold S. G. Bradshaw, led the attack. The Bogue aircraft got credit for the kill, but Niestlé writes that the cause of her loss is unknown.*
Like the Schill groups, Weddingen was a complete failure. No boat of Weddigen sank or even hit an Allied vessel. With the help of timely Enigma decrypts, the escorts of three convoys, Outbound South 59, KMS 33, and KMS 34, and two northbound convoys, Sierra Leone 140 and MKS 31, outfought and outwitted group Weddigen. In aggregate, Allied forces sank eight U-boats from the three Schill groups and the Weddigen group.
While crossing Biscay homebound on the night of December 13, another Weddigen boat, the new U-391, commanded by Gert Dultgen, was attacked by a Leigh Light-equipped B-24 of British Squadron 53. Flying into heavy flak, the pilot, Squadron Leader George Crawford, dropped six depth charges that destroyed U-391 with the loss of all hands. Later in the war, Crawford and most of this crew failed to return from a mission.
Control dissolved group Weddigen on December 6 and replaced it with group Borkum, composed of thirteen boats. To maximize Luftwaffe assistance and reduce the threat posed by Allied air, newly based in Gibraltar, French Morocco, and the Azores, and to save fuel, U-boat Control deployed Borkum directly west of the Bay of Biscay. Its mission was like that of Schill and Weddigen: to intercept MKS and KMS convoys merged with convoys going to and from Sierra Leone. Control warned Borkum to stay clear of the blockade-runners Osorno and Alsterufer, which were to pass close by, inbound to France.
From Enigma decrypts, Allied authorities were aware of group Borkum and the two inbound blockade-runners. Accordingly they rerouted the merged northbound convoys MKS 33 and Sierra Leone 142 to pass west of Borkum, and sent the merged southbound KMS 37 and Outbound South 63 east of Borkum. At the same time, they put in motion intricate plans to intercept and sink Osorno and Alsterufer. The upshot was a very busy time for both sides that, because of the secrecy imposed upon all Allied codebreaking activities, was to be confusing for historians.
The Allies ordered a hunter-killer group built around the “jeep” carrier Card to intercept the blockade-runners. Thereupon Card and her screen of three four-stack destroyers, westbound from Casablanca in company with convoy GUS 24, hauled out and ran north toward the likely area. As the hunter-killer group drew closer to the designated site in gale weather, a Luftwaffe aircraft saw and reported it and U-boat Control ordered group Borkum to rush southwest and to attack and sink the Card.
Shortly after midnight on December 24, the U-305, commanded by Rudolf Bahr, age twenty-seven, sighted the Card. Bahr got off a contact report, but it was DFed. One of the destroyers, Schenck, drove U-305 off and down with gunfire and depth charges. Responding to Bahr’s report, the U-415, commanded by Kurt Neide, age twenty-seven, came up, found Card, and shot three FATs, but all missed. Neide claimed that he sank a “destroyer” with a T-5, but that hit was never confirmed. Escorted by the detroyer Decatur, Card then withdrew, leaving Schenck and Leary to deal with the Borkum boats.
The Schenck, commanded by Earl W. Logsdon, got a radar contact on a U-boat and pursued. The quarry was thought to be the U-645, commanded by Otto Ferro, age thirty-two, who dived and possibly fired a T-5 at Schenck. When Schenck’s sonar reported a good contact, Logsdon carried out a systematic attack with depth charges. These evidently damaged U-645 so badly that Ferro surfaced. Schenck again got the U-boat on radar and attacked with guns and drove her under and dropped more depth charges. It was believed that these destroyed U-645 with all hands, but Niestlé doubts this and writes that the cause of the loss is unknown.
The Leary, commanded by James E. Kyes, also pursued a radar contact. Unwisely, Kyes fired star shells to illuminate the target, thereby exposing his own ship. The U-275, commanded by Helmut Bork, and the U-382, commanded by Rudolf Zorn, shot at Leary with T-5 torpedoes and sank her. Ninety-seven of Leary’s men, including Kyes, perished in the sinking or the water. Schenck rescued fifty-nine survivors and later transferred them to Card. After Reuben James and Jacob Jones, Leary was only the third American destroyer to be sunk by U-boats in the North Atlantic*
Kurt Neide in U-415, who had missed Card with three FATs, had better luck that night, Christmas Eve. Neide got into favorable shooting position on the British destroyer Hurricane, which had left the merged southbound convoys KMS 36 and Outbound South 62 to reinforce the Card group. Neide hit and damaged Hurricane, but she did not sink. During the night the damage was found to be greater than originally estimated, and after daylight—on Christmas Day—the Hurricane crew transferred to the frigate Glenarm and British forces put Hurricane under.
Berlin was ecstatic. Based on flash reports from Bork, Neide, and Zorn, the OKM diarist logged that the U-boats of Borkum “had sunk four destroyers in two days.” That was a 100 percent inflation. The confirmed number was two destroyers in two days.
A Luftwaffe aircraft sighted the blockade-runner Osorno in the extreme western waters of the Bay of Biscay. Upon receiving this report, the Germans sent out a flock of aircraft and six destroyers and six torpedo boats (Operation Bernau) to escort her and the other blockade-runner, Alsterufer, into France. Operating on Enigma decrypts, the British in turn sent out aircraft and two cruisers, Glasgow and Enterprise, to intercept and sink the blockade-runners, as well as the dozen would-be German escort vessels.
In a confused tangle of aircraft and surface ships, Allied forces humiliated the Germans, sinking the Alsterufer, the destroyer Z-27, and torpedo boats T-25 and T-26. Four Canadian corvettes rescued seventy-four Germans from Alsterufer. Two inbound and two outbound U-boats (group Hela) searched for survivors of Z-27 and the two torpedo boats. The “Hangar Queen” IXC 17-505, outbound to distant waters, picked up thirty-four survivors of T-25 and returned to France. Kurt Baberg in the inbound U-618 picked up twenty-one survivors of the destroyer Z-27 and landed them in France. The Osorno almost reached Bordeaux, but as she was going up the Gironde River, she hit a wreck and had to be beached.*
In the four months from September 1 to December 31, 1943, U-boat Control sailed thirty-seven upgraded VIIs and IXs to groups Schill, Weddigen, and Borkum operating in a Middle Atlantic triangle lying between Biscay, Gibraltar, and the Azores. In all, these boats sank one 3,000-ton merchant ship, the Norwegian Hall-fried, two destroyers, the American Leary and British Hurricane, and wrecked the British sloop Chanticleer beyond repair. In return, nine of the thirty-seven U-boats were lost, plus two (U-648 and U-536) that were shifted from North Atlantic to Middle Atlantic waters, a total loss of eleven U-boats and about 550 men. Moreover, as will be described, three other U-boats of this Middle Atlantic deployment were to be lost in January 1944. A half dozen other Middle Atlantic boats were forced to abort with battle damage.
The outcome of these operations demonstrated that with the Allied acquisition of air and naval bases in French Morocco and the Azores and the deployment of “jeep” carriers, the waters between Gibraltar and the Azores were as perilous to U-boat groups as were the waters between Iceland and the British Isles.
When the thirty-two losses on the North Atlantic run from September through December 1943 were added to the eleven losses in the Middle Atlantic in the same period, the result was forty-three U-boats. Two other VIIs returning from the. Americas (U-669 and U-760) were also lost in the Middle Atlantic or the Bay of Biscay, bringing the total losses for the period to a disastrous forty-five U-boats and about 2,200 men.
The shrinking Mediterranean U-boat force, based at Toulon and still commanded by Leo Kreisch, suffered yet another loss on the night of October 21. This was the aforementioned U-431, sunk by the Canadian Donald M. Cornish, piloting a Leigh Light-equipped Wellington of British Squadron 179. Cornish attacked into heavy flak and dropped six depth charges. These destroyed U-431 with the loss of all hands, including her skipper, Dietrich Schöneboom, but in the absence of positive evidence, the British did not credit Cornish arid his aircrew with the kill. Instead, the Admiralty mistakenly gave the credit to the British submarine Ultimatum, commanded by the able and highly decorated W. Hedley Kett, who attacked a German U-boat off Toulon ten days later.*
In compliance with Hitler’s oders, after the new Naxos radar detector had been installed, five more VIIs set sail from Atlantic bases for the Mediterranean in the second half of October. The result was even more setbacks for the Germans. Two boats, U-450 and U-642, commanded by Kurt Böhme, age twenty-six, and Herbert Brünning, age twenty-eight, slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar, but Allied forces sank three others:
• In the early hours of October 24, a Leigh Light-equipped Wellington of British Squadron 179, piloted by the same Canadian, Donald Cornish (who had sunk U-431 inside the Mediterranean just two days earlier), found Hans Hornkohl in the often bombed U-566 off Vigo, on the northwest coast of Spain. Cornish attacked into heavy flak, dropping six depth charges that wrecked the boat beyond repair. Like Brandi in U-617, Hornkohl nursed his stricken boat into shallow water and scuttled. A Spanish fishing trawler, the Fina, rescued the Germans and put them ashore in Vigo, They were “interned” briefly by Spanish authorities but returned to Brest by train on October 31. Thereafter, Hornkohl and crew commissioned a new VII.
• On the afternoon of October 31, a British surface-ship patrol detected Claus-Peter Carlsen in U-732 at the western mouth of the Gibraltar Strait. The big ASW trawler Imperialist, commanded by A.R.F. Pelling, attacked, dropping ten depth charges. These exploded directly below the keel of U-732 and blew her to the surface. Before Carlsen could get the boat under water again, Imperialist opened fire with her main gun and scored several hits. When the boat dived, Imperialist dropped twenty-eight more depth charges that drove U-732 to the bottom, where Carlsen lay doggo for about six hours.
After dark, Carlsen surfaced to escape at full speed on the diesels. One hour later an unidentified British aircraft got U-732 on radar and flashed an alarm. Unable or unwilling to dive again, Carlsen gave orders to scuttle. As the men were jumping overboard, the British destroyer Douglas, commanded by K.H.J.L. Phibbs, attacked, dropping ten depth charges close to the sinking boat. Douglas rescued eight Germans; the British destroyer Witherington picked up another ten. A Red Cross ship found Carlsen, bringing the number of survivors to nineteen.
• Only a few hours later, in the early minutes of November 1, a Leigh Light-equipped Wellington of British Squadron 179, piloted by Arthur H. Ellis, found Hans-Joachim Klaus in U-340 also at the mouth of Gibraltar Strait. Ellis attacked, dropping six depth charges, but an engine malfunctioned, forcing the Wellington to abort.
Later in the day another British surface patrol located U-340 with sonar. Three British warships, the destroyers Active and Witherington and the sloop Fleetwood, pounded the boat with depth charges. Still later that day, Klaus elected to scuttle close to shore so the Germans could swim to Spanish soil. After the forty-eight Germans had been in the water about four hours, a Spanish fishing trawler came along and picked them up. The Germans celebrated their rescue, but, as it turned out, prematurely. The sloop Fleetwood came up and captured all the Germans.
Apparently some of the sixty-seven Germans captured from U-732 and U-340 talked freely. From them the British obtained detailed information about the T-5 Wren (or GNAT) “antidestroyer” homing torpedo, the ineffective Wanze and the new Naxos radar detectors, the Aphrodite radar decoy, and the quad 20mm and twin 20mm flak guns.
Allied ground forces in rugged Italy, inching northward up the “boot” toward Rome, liberated Naples, crossed the Volturno River, and finally bogged down at the so-called German Gustav Line above the Rapido River at the monastery of Monte Cassino. To crack this line and liberate Rome, Allied planners conceived Operation Shingle, a large-scale amphibious landing at Anzio, on the west coast of Italy behind the Gustav Line opposite Rome. To carry out this ambitious new task, in January 1944 a great many Allied naval assets (particularly LSTs) were retained temporarily in the Mediterranean, ultimately resulting in a postponement of Overlord.
The Mediterranean U-boat force contributed little to the campaign in Italy. The most significant strike was made by Egon-Reiner von Schlippenbach in U-453. On November 11, he planted minefields off Brindisi and Bari, seaports on the east coast of Italy. The British fleet destroyer Quail hit one of the mines and incurred such heavy damage that she had to be scrapped. Another of these mines destroyed the 800-ton fleet minesweeper Hebe. Second in importance during November was the work of Ernst-Ulrich Brüller in U-407, who late in the month damaged by torpedo the 9,100-ton British cruiser Birmingham. Two other veteran boats, U-73 and U-81, each sank medium-size Allied freighters for an aggregate 7,400 tons.
The most notable German naval success in the Mediterranean in November was achieved by the Luftwaffe. The HE-177 squadron, equipped with HS 293 smart bombs, which had failed against Atlantic convoys, hit the 8,600-ton British troopship Rohna off Bougie on November 26. Jammed with Allied soldiers, she was en route from the British Isles in convoy KMF 26. Altogether 1,149 men perished. Of these, about one thousand were U.S. Army, the worst loss of American soldiers at sea in all of World War II. This appalling British troopship disaster was not revealed during the war, and the full dimensions of it have come to light only recently.*
Notwithstanding the urgent orders and exhortations from Berlin, only three U-boats had actually reached the Mediterranean in the fall of 1943: Wächter’s U-223, Böhme’s U-450, and Brünning’s U-642. Inasmuch as two more U-boats had been lost (U-617 and U-431) inside the Mediterranean during this period, the flotilla increased by only one boat to fourteen. Moreover, Allied forces sank two more Mediterranean boats in December.
• Off Algiers on December 11, Karl-Jürgen Wächter in U-223 hit and wrecked beyond repair with a T-5 Wren homing torpedo the British frigate Cuckmere, which was escorting convoy KMS 34. The next day, a little farther east near Djidjelli, Ritterkreuz holder Gerd Kelbling in U-593 sank with a T-5 Wren the British Hunt-class destroyer Tynedale. The loss of these two British warships in Algerian waters prompted Allied authorities to deploy a hunter-killer group of five surface ships. In the early hours of December 12, the group located U-593, but her skipper, Kelbling, sank yet another British Hunt-class destroyer, Holcombe.
Assisted by aircraft, the four remaining warships of the hunter-killer group carried out a relentless search for U-593. Late in the afternoon of December 13, the American destroyer Wainwright finally got an unambiguous sonar contact. She and another British Hunt-class destroyer, Calpe, conducted a brutal depth-charge attack that drove U-593 to the surface, whereupon both warships opened fire with guns. Hopelessly trapped, Kelbling scuttled and abandoned ship. Wainwright arid Calpe picked up all fifty-one of the U-593 crew and took them to North Africa.
• Westward of that U-boat kill, near Oran, on the afternoon of December 16, Horst Deckert in U-73 found convoy GUS 24 and hit the 7,200-ton American Liberty ship John S. Copley, which, however, limped into port. In response, a hunter- killer group, composed of three American destroyers, left Mers el-Kébir and raced to the scene. About an hour into the hunt, the Woolsey got a positive sonar contact and attacked with depth charges. The close explosions cracked the pressure hull of U-73 and caused flooding that could not be stanched. Deckert surfaced to fight it out, whereupon Woolsey and Trippe opened fire with guns that killed many Ger mans, riddled the boat, and forced Deckert to scuttle and abandon ship. The Woolsey and the other destroyer, Edison, picked up Deckert and thirty-three other Germans, including two wounded men and a doctor, and took them to North Africa, where the crew of U-593 was also temporarily imprisoned. Sixteen Ger mans perished in this sinking.
Both American and British warships were involved in the kills of U-73 and U-593. As a consequence, Allied authorities fell into a minor bureaucratic spat over where the POWs should be sent, Washington or London. During this delay, the second watch officers of both boats, Kurt Kinkele and Armin Weighardt, “hid in a closet” in Algiers, escaped to Spain, and ultimately reached Germany.
These two losses reduced the Mediterranean force to twelve U-boats, three of which had been damaged during a heavy Allied bomber raid on Toulon on November 24. On December 5, the experienced U-230, commanded by Paul Siegmann, got into the Mediterranean, raising that force once again to thirteen boats.
An astonishing event electrified the Mediterranean U-boat force that fall. The first of the force commanders, Ritterkreuz holder Viktor Oehrn (from November 28, 1941), reappeared, as if from the dead. He had a riveting story to tell. After Leo Kreisch had relieved Oehrn on February 1, 1942, Oehrn remained in various naval staff positions in Italy, all of them uninteresting and unimportant. On the night of July 13, 1942, while serving as a naval liaison to Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps near El Alamein, Oehrn became lost in the desert, blundered into British Commonwealth positions, and was badly shot up and captured by Australian soldiers. Taken to a British hospital in Alexandria, Oehrn hovered on the edge of death for weeks. He never fully recovered from his wounds and, as a consequence, he was repatriated on November 3, 1943, having been a POW for almost sixteen months. Two weeks later, he reported for staff duty at U-boat Control in Berlin.
British naval intelligence was apparently unaware that the former first staff officer to Karl Dönitz, U-boat “ace,” and former Mediterranean U-boat force commander was in British custody in Egypt all that time.
In the four months from September 1 to December 31, 1943, U-boat Control mounted twenty-four war patrols to or in distant areas: thirteen to the Americas and eleven to West Africa and the Indian Ocean.
Five boats sailed to the Americas in September:
• The new XB minelayer U-220, commanded by Bruno Barber, age thirty-nine, planted an SMA minefield off St. John’s, Newfoundland, on October 9. About a week later these mines sank two medium-size freighters, the 3,400-ton American Delisle and the 3,700-ton British Penolver. Until the mines could be swept, the port was closed, with the usual shipping delays and confusion. As related, U-220 then served as a provisional refueler in the North Atlantic and was sunk on October 28.
• The veteran IXC U-155, commanded by Ritterkreuz holder Adolf-Cornelius Piening, patrolled to Brazilian waters. In a cautious outing, Piening sank one freighter, the 5,400-ton Norwegian Stranger. Upon his return to France, Piening left the boat to command Combat Flotilla 7 in St. Nazaire.*
• The veteran VIID (minelayer) U-218, commanded by Richard Becker, planted an SMA minefield off Trinidad on October 27. The minefield produced no sinkings, but on November 4, Becker sank by gun a sailing vessel off the southeast coast of Trinidad. He returned to France on December 8.
• The “Hangar Queen,” U-505, commanded by Peter Zschech, finally got away from Lorient on September 18. Two days later, while en route to top off her fuel tanks, one of U-505’s diesels “froze up tight.” The crew fixed that problem, but on September 23, the important main trim pump broke and Zschech had no spare parts. He returned to Lorient on September 30, doubtless shamefaced.
• The new IXC40 U-537, commanded by Peter Schrewe, age twenty-nine, sailed to plant a sophisticated automatic weather station at Martin Bay, a bleak, deserted site on the east coast of Labrador. After Schrewe diverted temporarily to report weather himself and lost his flak gun in heavy seas, he reached Martin Bay on October 22. A scientist, Kurt Summermeyer, and Schrewe’s crew placed the station on a 170-foot hill about four hundred yards inland. It functioned for several days but was then apparently jammed. Its remains were not discovered by Canadian officials until 1981.
Aware from Enigma decrypts of £7-537’s special mission, commencing on October 29 Canadian ASW forces mounted a hunt to exhaustion (Salmon) for her. Although U-537 had a Naxos radar detector, on October 31a Hudson of Canadian Squadron 11, piloted by F. L. Burston, found her on the surface and attacked with eight rockets, none of which hit. Farther south, near Cape Race, a Canso (Catalina) of Canadian Squadron 5, escorting convoy Halifax 265, found U-537 on November 10 and attacked through flak to drop four depth charges, which fell wide. The next day, another Canso of Squadron 5, piloted by R. Duncan, attacked U-537 through flak to drop depth charges, which inflicted slight damage. The ex-American four-stack British destroyer Montgomery, an escort from convoy Halifax 265, and other Cansos came up, but again U-537 slipped away. Senior Canadian authorities judged that this Salmon hunt had been thoroughly botched. After serving briefly as a radio decoy, U-537 reached France on December 8.
Four boats sailed to West Africa or to the Indian Ocean in September and October.
• Wilhelm Rollmann, who won a Ritterkreuz on U-34 in 1940, embarked for the Far East in the new IXD2 U-cruiser U-848. On November 2, he sank the lone 4,600-ton British freighter Baron Semple. This sinking alerted U.S. Army and Navy ASW aircraft on Ascension Island. These included, notably, a detachment of four B-24s of U.S. Navy Squadron VB 107 from Natal, Brazil.*While out searching about three hundred miles southwest of Ascension on November 5, the crew of a Navy B-24 piloted by Charles A. Baldwin found U-848 on the surface and flashed a contact report. In two runs into massive flak, Baldwin dropped twelve depth charges and severely damaged the U-boat, which remained on the surface, trailing “a great amount” of fuel oil.
Circling beyond flak range, Baldwin homed in two other Navy B-24s. These were piloted by William R. Ford (who had sunk U-164 earlier in the year) and by William E. Hill Supported by Baldwin, who strafed the boat, Ford made two runs into heavy flak. He dropped twelve depth charges, but both salvos fell short and he returned to Ascension. Also supported by Baldwin, who made another strafing run, Hill attacked the U-boat from behind, but Rollmann’s gunners shot out one of Hill’s engines, forcing him too to return to Ascension.
Baldwin continued to circle the damaged U-boat beyond flak range. Four hours after his crew had first spotted U-848, Baldwin homed in Ford’s B-24, returning from Ascension with the same crew but a new pilot, Samuel K. Taylor. At about the same time, three Army Air Forces B-25s arrived from Ascension. These dropped 500-pound general-purpose bombs from 1,500 feet, but not surprisingly, the attacks were ineffective.
Taylor made two runs, dropping twelve depth charges. On this second attack, Taylor’s aircrew performed with consummate skill. The depth charges fell close and “the enemy broke in half and sank.” Taylor’s crew counted “twenty-five or thirty” survivors in the water and dropped three life rafts, but only one German, chief boatswain Hans Schade, survived. A month later, on December 3, the American cruiser Marblehead rescued Schade from a raft, but he was delirious and died two days later in a hospital in Recife, Brazil, where he was buried with appropriate military ceremony.
• The veteran U-68, commanded by Albert Lauzemis, patrolled in the Gulf of Guinea and off Freetown. On October 22 Lauzemis found and attacked a convoy in the gulf. After misfiring seven torpedoes, he sank the British ASW trawler Orfasay and the 5,400-ton Norwegian tanker Litiopa with his deck gun. In subsequent weeks, Lauzemis sank by torpedo two more ships, the 6,600-ton British freighter New Columbia and the 5,200-ton Free French passenger-cargo vessel Fort de Vaux. These successes raised his bag for this 107-day patrol to four ships for 17,612 tons.
• The aging IXB U-103, commanded by Gustav-Adolf Janssen, age twenty-eight, laid a minefield at Takoradi on October 23. Thereafter Janssen cautiously hunted ships in the Gulf of Guinea and off Freetown. He had no luck with mines or torpedoes. On his return voyage, Janssen refueled from the Type XB minelayer U-219, serving as a provisional tanker, then retired U-103 to the Baltic Training Command via Norway.
• Ritterkreuz holder Heinz-Otto Schultze in the new IXD2 U-cruiser U-849 embarked from Kiel for the Far East on October 2. On November 25, another U.S. Navy B-24 of the Squadron VB 107 contingent staging at Ascension Island found U-849 on the surface. The pilot, Marion Vance Dawkins, Jr., straddled U-849 with six depth charges dropped from an altitude of merely twenty-five feet. The missiles sank U-849, but a ricocheting depth-charge warhead severely damaged the horizontal and vertical tail section of the B-24, which, however, limped back to Ascension. Dawkins reported “about thirty” survivors in the water to whom he dropped life rafts, but no Germans were ever recovered.
Seven boats sailed to the Americas in October.
Departing France on October 2, the IXC U-154, commanded by Oskar-Heinz Kusch, age twenty-five, patrolled via the Portuguese Azores, newly occupied by British ASW forces, then onward to northern Brazilian waters. Near the mouth of the Amazon on November 3, Kusch found a convoy but was prevented from attacking it by an unidentified Catalina, which he repelled, he reported. Kusch then moved north to the coast of French Guiana, where, he also reported, he was twice attacked by aircraft on the night of November 22. Low on fuel—and unable to refuel—Kusch returned to France on December 20.
During this patrol of U-154, the ideological and personality gulfs between Kusch and his first watch officer, Ulrich Abel (a doctor of laws who was six years older), widened drastically. On Christmas Day, when Kusch submitted an evaluation of Abel for commanding officer’s school, he wrote that although Abel was an “inflexible, rigid, and one-sided officer” of “average talent,” he was nonetheless suitable for U-boat command at the front.
This praising-with-faint-damnation endorsement evidently shocked and infuriated Abel, described as a die-hard Nazi. About three weeks later, on January 12, 1944, Abel filed a formal document accusing Kusch of sedition, and another on January 25 accusing Kusch of cowardice. The first document triggered formal legal proceedings that led to Kusch’s arrest on January 20 and confinement at the Angers (France) Military Prison. Six days later, a military trial convened at Kiel to weigh the accusations against Kusch.
Abel’s charges of sedition were backed up by two other watch officers on U-154. All three men swore that Kusch had ridiculed Hitler as insane, Utopian, megalomaniacal, pathologically ambitious, and worse. Kusch had thrown out the standard wardroom photo of Hitler with the comment: “There will be no more idol worship on this boat.” He had also predicted repeatedly that Germany would soon lose the war, one reason being that the U-boats were completely obsolescent. The constant flow of admonitions from U-boat Control to the skippers to fight on relentlessly was so much useless “whip-cracking” and “slave-driving.” On top of all that, Kusch obsessively tuned in to BBC and other Allied news broadcasts, a grave crime in the Third Reich.
The court found Kusch guilty of sedition and listening to foreign radio stations. The prosecution recommended a sentence of ten years and six months imprisonment, but the court, which included U-boat skipper Otto Westphalen, ruled on January 29 that Kusch be executed. Later Westphalen said he would have supported a petition for clemency, with probation to a fighting unit, but Kusch filed no such petition. On May 12, a firing squad in Kiel carried out the sentence.
At no time before or during the trial did Karl Dönitz see Kusch or even allow his views of the situation to be known. However, numerous Kriegsmarine officers, including his former skippers on U-103, Ritterkreuz holder Werner Winter and Gustav-Adolf Janssen, and the Ritterkreuz holder Wilhelm Franken from U-565 in the Mediterranean, leaped to defend Kusch. They and many others in the U-boat arm deeply resented the fact that neither Dönitz nor von Friedeburg nor Godt did anything at all to help this “comrade.”
In his memoir, Erich Topp wrote:
Whatever the political environment may have been, it would still have been in place here for Dönitz to speak to his commander at least once and to stand by him. Or was he so naive that he did not know what people were saying in the U-boat messes about the Party and the Gröfaz.*... If we comprehend tradition as being in touch with and continuing lofty intellectual currents, then Sub-Lieutenant Kusch undoubtedly fits into this pattern, whereas Admiral of the Fleet Dönitz does not.
In the postwar years, Topp, who became a ranking admiral in the Bundesmarine, the West German Navy, attempted to rehabilitate Kusch, but he encountered bitter opposition from Hans-Rudolf Rösing and Karl-Friedrich Merten, among others. Under an Allied occupation law that permitted the punishment of persons found guilty of war crimes, crimes against peace, or crimes against humanity, in 1949 and 1950 Kusch’s father sued members of the court, including Westphalen, for the murder of his son. Jurors or judges in three different trials acquitted the defendants.†
The IXC U-516, commanded by Hans-Rutger Tillessen, age thirty, who departed France on October 4, also patrolled via the Azores to the Caribbean. Despite the debilitating heat and strong Allied ASW measures, Tillessen found fair hunting off Colon, Panama. In four weeks, from November 11 to December 8, he sank four ships (one tanker) for about 14,500 tons, plus a sailing vessel. On the return voyage through the Caribbean toward Trinidad, Tillessen added a big American tanker to his bag, the 10,200-ton McDowell, but he missed a destroyer. Total: five ships (two tankers) for 24,700 tons and the 39-ton Colombian sailing vessel Ruby. On December 19, near Trinidad, an unidentified Allied aircraft bombed U-516, causing “considerable damage,” and Tillessen headed home, seeking fuel from any other attack boat that could provide it.
The IXC U-505, still commanded by Peter Zschech, age twenty-five, who had made countless attempts to carry out another war patrol in the ten months preceding, sailed for the Caribbean on October 9. This attempt also ended in an abort. In the midst of a depth-charge attack by unidentified Allied forces on October 24, Zschech, doubtless feeling intense pressure to perform or else, committed suicide with his pistol. The first watch officer, Paul Meyer, age twenty-six, assumed command, buried Zschech at sea, and returned U-505 to France on November 7.
The IXC U-129, commanded by Richard von Harpe, age twenty-six, sailed on October 12 to patrol the United States East Coast from Cape Hatteras to Florida. En route, on October 26, von Harpe came upon the huge and fast ocean liner Acquitania but was unable to get off a shot. On November 12, he met the Type XIV tanker U-488 and refueled, along with the IXC40s U-193 and U-530, bound for the Gulf of Mexico and Panama, respectively. The U-193 had already given some fuel to the inbound VIID (minelayer) U-214.
The Tenth Fleet alerted Allied forces that were still pursuing U-488 to this rendezvous. A hunter-killer group built; around the “jeep” carrier Core arrived in the designated area on November 15. In the early hours of that day, von Harpe in U-129 sighted Core and fired four torpedoes at her, but they missed. All ships in the Core group felt a “heavy shock wave” and “about six lighter shocks” on their hulls—probably end-of-run torpedo explosions. Von Harpe went deep, evaded the hunting destroyers, and continued his voyage to Cape Hatteras. The other two IXs and the tanker U-488 also avoided detection. Upon learning of the presence of this carrier hunter-killer group, U-boat Control directed U-488 to cease all refueling operations and to come home immediately.
Von Harpe in U-129 found the hunting poor at Cape Hatteras. Patrolling to the southernmost limit of his zone on December 4, he came upon a convoy, KN 280, bound from Key West to Norfolk. He claimed sinking a freighter and a “destroyer” but only the freighter, the 5,400-ton Cuban Libertad, was confirmed. He had no further luck and commenced his homeward voyage, like Tillessen in U-516, seeking fuel.
In response to the urgent requests for fuel, U-boat Control directed the new IXC40 U-544, commanded by Willi Mattke, age thirty-four, to rendezvous with the homebound Tillessen in U-516 and von Harpe in U-129. When Allied code-breakers learned of the proposed meeting from Enigma decrypts, a hunter-killer group built around the new “jeep” carrier Guadalcanal, which sailed from Norfolk on January 5, was directed to the scene.
Commanded by Daniel V. Gallery, Guadalcanal launched aircraft to search for the three U-boats about five hundred miles west of the Azores on January 16. Two aircraft, piloted by Bert J. Hudson and William M. McLane, found the three boats refueling and immediately launched an unorthodox attack, firing rockets and depth charges simultaneously. Some of these hit and sank the provisional refueler, Willi Mattke’s U-544. The airmen saw “twenty to thirty-five” Germans in the water, but despite a diligent search, the Guadalcanal’s escort vessels could not find a single survivor. The U-129 and U-516 dived and escaped.*
Von Harpe in U-129 went on to France, but Tillessen in U-516, desperate for fuel, could not. Therefore U-boat Control ordered the outbound IXC40 U-539, commanded by Hans-Jürgen Lauterbach-Emden, age twenty-four, to rendezvous with U-516 and give her fuel.
The U-539, which had sailed from France for a patrol to the Caribbean on January 3, was the first boat of the Atlantic force to conduct a war patrol with a snorkel.* The two boats came within hailing distance on January 22, but owing to the foul weather—yet another ghastly winter storm in the North Atlantic—they were unable to carry out the refueling operations until February 5, when Tillessen in U-516 finally got enough fuel to reach France. Delayed and low on fuel, Lauterbach-Emden in U-539 patrolled to Canada rather than the distant Caribbean.
After obtaining fuel from the harassed tanker U-488 on November 12, the IXC40 U-193, commanded by the old hand Hans Pauckstadt, age thirty-seven, patrolled to the Gulf of Mexico. West of the Florida Straits on December 3, Pauckstadt sank with three torpedoes his first—and only—ship, the new 10,200-ton American tanker Touchet, loaded with 150,000 barrels of heating oil. She blew up and burst into flames. Of the eighty crewmen, ten perished, and the rest were rescued from lifeboats.
Hans Pauckstadt in U-193 was the last U-boat skipper to patrol the Gulf of Mexico in World War II. Altogether in this little-noted area, U-boats sank fifty-six ships (twenty-four tankers) and damaged fourteen other vessels.† Contrary to rumors that were rife during the war, no U-boat received any intelligence from Axis spies operating close to the seashore, nor did any boat refuel from secret supply ships in the Louisiana bayous or elsewhere, nor did any Germans go ashore in disguise to enjoy the delights of Mobile, New Orleans, Houston, or Galveston.
On the return voyage, Allied aircraft hit U-193 off Cape Finisterre. She was “thrown on the rocks” and severely damaged, but she survived this mishap and limped into El Ferrol, Spain, on February 10. After extensive makeshift repairs, she sailed on February 20 and reached Lorient five days later.
After refueling from the tanker U-488, also on November 12, the IXC40 U-530, commanded by Kurt Lange, patrolled the Caribbean Sea to Panama. On the day after Christmas, Lange hit and damaged the 10,200-ton American tanker Chapultepec off Colón. Three days later, on December 29, he attacked another American tanker, Esso Buffalo, firing three torpedoes, but they missed. Unknowingly, this tanker rammed U-530, but Lange was able to make repairs and continue the patrol. He returned to France on February 22, completing an arduous voyage of 130 days, during which he sank no confirmed ships.
Unable to refuel on the outbound leg, Max Wintermeyer in the IXC40 U-190 nevertheless patrolled to northern Brazilian waters. Cruising cautiously offshore between the mouth of the Amazon River and Fortaleza, Wintermeyer reported that he “saw nothing.” Owing to the shortage of fuel—and the uncertainty of refueling—he commenced his homebound voyage on December 12. Control directed Wintermeyer to meet and obtain the newest Naxos radar detection gear from the U-172, which was outbound to Penang, but he could not find her and continued on to France. The boat arrived on January 15, completing a barren patrol of ninety-one days.
Owing to the absence of U-tankers and other factors, only one boat patrolled to the Americas in November 1943 and none in December.
The new IXC40 U-543, commanded by Hans-Jürgen Hellriegel, who had earlier commanded the U-96 of the Atlantic force, sailed from Kiel to Newfoundland waters on November 9. En route, Hellriegel diverted temporarily to anticonvoy operations with group Coronel. Detached from Coronel on December 16, U-543 proceeded toward Newfoundland with orders to hunt ships and also to broadcast weather reports twice daily. On December 27, Hellriegel reported that he had chased the big, fast, ocean liner Acquitania in vain. Alerted to the presence of this boat by Enigma decrypts and Huff Duff, Canadian authorities mounted a massive hunt for her three hundred miles east of the coast of Newfoundland.
This hunt, carried out from December 23 to January 6, entailed a great many Canadian forces, including aircraft, escorts of nearby convoys, and a hunter-killer group. The historian of the Royal Canadian Air Force, W.A.B. Douglas,*calculated that despite hideous flying weather, the Canadians completed twenty-one Br24 and seven Canso sorties. None, however, had any luck. Hellriegel shot T-5s at two “destroyers” hunting him on December 30 and January 3, and claimed both sank. Even though they could not be confirmed, Control credited these “sinkings,” and Dönitz awarded Hellriegel a Ritterkreuz after his return to France.†
The thirteen patrols mounted to the Americas in September, October, and November sank eight merchant ships for 45,700 tons plus the sailing vessel Ruby. Tillessen in U-516 accounted for about half of that number. Seven of the thirteen boats sank no ships. Probably as a result of better radio discipline in the patrol areas, the new Naxos centimetric-wavelength radar detector, and caution on the part of the skippers, no U-boats were lost.
Six attack boats sailed to West Africa and the Indian Ocean in November and December. As related, one boat, the outbound U-505, under a new skipper, Harald Lange, age thirty-nine, rescued survivors of the German torpedo boat T-25 and returned to France. The others had various adventures.
Alfred Eick in the IXC U-510, embarked for Penang, refueled from the XB minelayer U-219, serving as a provisional tanker, on November 30. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Eick shot three torpedoes at a freighter off Durban on January 13 but missed. Per plan, on January 28 he met the German tanker Charlotte Schliemann about three hundred miles south of Mauritius and refueled.
Thereafter Eick patrolled aggressively but carefully the northernmost reaches of the Arabian Sea between Oman and India in “awful” heat and humidity. On February 22, he found convoy PA 69 en route from the Persian Gulf to Aden. In two attacks, he claimed two tankers and a freighter sunk for 25,000 tons, one freighter of 7,000 tons left burning and probably sinking, and a hit on another freighter of 7,000 tons. Allied records show that in these two attacks, Eick sank the 7,400-ton British tanker San Alvaro, the 9,200-ton American freighter E. G. Seubert, and damaged the 10,000-ton Norwegian tanker Erling Brovig. In the month of March Eick claimed sinking three more freighters (two Norwegian, one American) for an aggregate of 18,000 tons plus a sailing vessel. Allied records confirmed three freighters of 14,700 tons sunk. Eick then proceeded to Penang, arriving on April 5. Two days later Berlin notified Eick that he had been awarded a Ritterkreuz.*
The IXD2 U-cruiser U-178 departed Penang on November 27 for France with about 153 tons of cargo: thirty tons of rubber, 121 tons of tin, and two tons of tungsten (wolfram). Inasmuch as Ritterkreuz holder Wilhelm Dommes, who had commanded the boat on its outward voyage, was still ill, he remained in Penang. The boat’s first watch officer, Wilhelm Spahr, age thirty-nine, who had been Prien’s quartermaster during the legendary sinking of the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow in 1939, moved up to command.
Near the Maldives, Spahr sank the 7,200-ton American Liberty ship Jose Navarro, then met Eick in U-510 and the tanker Charlotte Schliemann south of Mauritius on January 28. He topped off his fuel tanks, took aboard nineteen more tons of rubber, got Enigma keys (for June) from U-510, then headed southwest for Cape Town.
Following his temporary attachment to group Schill, during which he hit the British sloop Chanticleer and was in turn heavily damaged, Werner Henke in the IXC U-515, who wore Oak Leaves on his Ritterkreuz, made repairs and patrolled to Freetown. In the week from December 17 to December 24, Henke sank three British freighters for 20,900 tons: Kingswood, Phemius, and Dumana. These together with the single freighter sunk in the Bahamas by von Harpe in U-129 were the only successes by the Germans against merchant ships in the whole of the Atlantic Ocean in December.
While homebound, heavy seas and engine vibration opened up a temporary weld on one of U-515’s aft buoyancy tanks. For the second time on this patrol, Henke stopped off the deserted shore of a remote island to make repairs—this time in the Cape Verdes. Later, while approaching Lorient on January 16, he repelled two RAF twin-engine Mosquito bombers with his flak guns. He claimed sinking four ships for 22,000 tons (including the sloop Chanticleer), which closely matched the confirmed figures. Henke might well have requested a safe shore job, but in hopes of winning more fame and awards, he elected to retain command of U-515.
After an extensive overhaul and an upgrade in flak guns, the IXC U-172 sailed from France to Penang on November 22 commanded by a new skipper, Hermann Hoffmann, her former second and first watch officer. Only twenty-two years old, Hoffmann was the youngest officer in the Atlantic U-boat force yet to be promoted to command. While U-172 was outbound in the Bay of Biscay, an unidentified Coastal Command land-based bomber detected her on the night of December 3, dropped six depth charges, then strafed the boat with machine-gun fire, but she escaped.
Hoffmann met the XB minelayer U-219, serving as a provisional tanker, on about December 10 and filled U-172’s fuel tanks. When Allied codebreakers provided reliable advanced information on this rendezvous, a hunter-killer group built around the “jeep” carrier Bogue left her convoy, GUS 23, and rushed to the area. The aircraft were unable to locate the U-boats during the meeting but shortly after sunrise on December 12, Avenger pilot Elisha C. Gaylord found U-172 on the surface and drove her under. He summoned help and dropped a Fido that apparently missed, and Hoffmann went deep.
The skipper of Bogue, Joseph B. Dunn, ordered a “hunt to exhaustion.” For the next twenty-seven hours, Bogue’s aircraft and her screen, the four-stackers George E. Badger, Clemson, Du Pont, and Osmond Ingram, hunted and blasted U-172 with bombs, depth charges, Hedgehogs, and Fidos. Finally, at about 10 A.M. on December 13, the savaged U-172 surfaced to fight it out. Manning a machine gun, Hoffmann killed one American and injured six others on Osmond Ingram. In return, Badger, Clemson, Du Pont, and Osmond Ingram raked U-172 with intense fire of all kinds, killing thirteen Germans and forcing the survivors, including Hoffmann, to leap into the sea. The destroyers fished out Hoffmann and forty-five other Germans and took them on to Norfolk.
The new IXD2 U-cruiser U-850 sailed from Kiel to Penang on November 18, commanded by the renowned submariner Klaus Ewerth, age thirty-six. A member of the crew of 1925, Ewerth had attended the first Kriegsmarine submarine-school class (1933) and was chosen to commission the first submarine, the duck U-l, in 1935. Subsequently he had commanded the Type VIIs U-35 and U-36, and the Type 1 U-26 that he took on two war patrols in the early months of the war. After a long stint in the Training Command, Ewerth had commissioned U-850 in April 1943.
On the afternoon of December 20, U-boat Control signaled Ewerth the good news that his wife had given birth to their fifth child and all was well. A mere twenty minutes later, an Avenger from Bogue, piloted by Wallace A. LaFleur, sighted U-850 running on the surface. LaFleur gave the alarm, then attacked. His depth charges failed to release on the first pass and fell short on the second. Four other aircraft (two Wildcats, two Avengers) arrived from Bogue to help. In the ensuing exchange of fire, the aircraft drove U-850 under. Pilots LaFleur and Harold G. Bradshaw then launched Fidos that hit and sank U-850. The destroyers Badger and Du Pont picked up pieces of wood and clothing and “dismembered bodies” but could find no survivors.
The twenty-three patrols to the Americas, West Africa, and to or in the Indian Ocean mounted in the last four months of 1943 produced a bag of twenty-four Allied merchant ships (including four tankers) for about 134,500 tons, plus the sloop Chanticleer and two sailing vessels. This made small impact on Allied maritime assets, but it was sufficient damage to ensure a continuation of convoying in those remote areas and the deployment of numerous Allied aircraft and surface ships on ASW patrols.
The Germans paid a stiff price for these twenty-four merchant-ship sinkings: four of the twenty-three U-boats sunk, including the famous IXC U-172 and three new IXD2 U-cruisers, U-848, U-849, and U-850. The approximately 160 dead submariners included three of the four skippers: Ritterkreuz holders Wilhelm Rollmann and Heinz-Otto Schultze, and Klaus Ewerth.
Midway between the Baywatch and Avalanche landings in Italy, on September 6 the German battleship Tirpitz and battle cruiser Scharnhorst, screened by ten destroyers, sailed from Altenfiord in northern Norway. This task force ran north in the Barents Sea to the island of Spitzbergen, bombarded the provisional British base there, then dashed back to Altenfiord. The official British naval historian noted that this minor operation was the only time in her twenty-one months in the Arctic that Tirpitz had fired her main battery at the enemy.
The British Home Fleet, reinforced by the old American carrier Ranger, two American cruisers, Augusta and Tuscaloosa, and five American destroyers, belatedly sailed to intercept the Germans but to no avail. Tirpitz and Scharnhorst, as well as the “pocket” battleship Lützow, remained moored in Altenfiord, serving in the role of “fleet in being” to tie down Allied warships and threaten Murmansk convoys.
The Tirpitz sortie rattled the Admiralty and persuaded it to approve a bold but chancy operation (Source), long in the making: a midget-submarine raid on the three big German warships in Altenfiord.
The British had built six midget subs specifically for this task. Known as “X-craft” (X-5 to X-10), they were forty-eight feet long and displaced thirty-nine tons. Manned by four volunteers, each X-craft was armed with two 4, 000-pound Amatol detachable charges, designed to be released to the sea bottom beneath the hull of a moored vessel and triggered by a timed fuse. During extensive trials and drills, the X-craft had performed as designed, although they were not exempt from the inherent shortcomings of all midget submarines.
Six full-size “parent” submarines*sailed from Loch Cairnbawn, northwest Scotland, on September 11 and 12, each towing an X-craft. Three midgets (X-5, X-6, X-7) were to attack Tirpitz, two (X-9, X-10) were to attack Scharnhorst, and one (X-8) was to attack Lutzow. However, two midgets (X-8, X-9) were lost or scuttled en route, leaving the three for Tirpitz but only one (X-10) for Scharnhorst and none for Lutzow.
The parent submarines launched the four midgets on the evening of September 20 at a site about 150 miles from Altenfiord. One, X-5, was lost; another, X-70, could not find Scharnhorst, aborted to her parent submarine, and was lost while returning to Scotland. On September 22, two midgets, X-6 and X-7, commanded by Donald Cameron and Basil Charles Godfrey Place, respectively, reached Tirpitz and released charges (four in all for 16,000 pounds), which blew up and damaged all three sets of the battleship’s main turbines. This remarkable feat put Tirpitz completely out of action in Altenfiord until April 1944. Both midgets were lost in the operation; two of the eight crewmen of X-6 and X-7 were killed, six were captured.*
On the day after the British disabled Tirpitz, September 23, the “pocket” battleship Liitzow sailed for the Baltic. Alerted to this departure, the British attempted to intercept Lützow with land-based RAF and fleet aircraft, but failed. She reached Danzig on October 1 and never again left the Baltic.
The damage to Tirpitz and the departure of Lützow left only the Scharnhorst and her screen in northern Norway to threaten Murmansk convoys. Therefore the commander in chief, Home Fleet,† Bruce Fraser, judged that these politically desirable convoys could resume sailing in the Arctic darkness of November. Churchill informed Stalin that the Admiralty intended to sail one convoy of forty merchant ships per month in November, December, January, and February, altogether 160 vessels plus escorts. However, when Fraser, like his predecessor John Tovey, objected strenuously to such large convoys, Churchill accepted Fraser’s alternative plan to sail convoys of half that size (about twenty ships) every two weeks.
The Murmansk convoys recommenced sailing on November 1. On that day a return convoy, RA 54A (thirteen empty ships) left Kola Inlet and reached the British Isles with no losses. On November 15 and 22, eastbound convoys JW 54A (eighteen loaded ships) and JW 54B (fourteen loaded ships) left Loch Ewe for Kola Inlet. Both arrived with no losses. Another return convoy, RA 54B (eight empty ships) sailed from Kola Inlet on November 27 and also arrived in the British Isles with no losses.
During the hiatus in Murmansk convoys over the summer and into the fall of 1943, Dönitz allowed the Arctic U-boat force to remain at about a dozen boats. Except for a very few inconsequential Soviet ships, these U-boats sank nothing from March to November 1943, a waste of assets that Dönitz repeatedly deplored. However, U-boat losses in the Arctic area in this period were likewise inconsequential compared with other areas: only the U-639 commanded by Walter Wichman, which was sunk by a Soviet submarine, 5-707, in the Kara Sea while planting a minefield.
The Germans became aware belatedly that the Murmansk convoys had resumed in November. Humiliated by the X-craft attack on Tirpitz and the abject failure of the U-boats in the North and Middle Atlantic, Dönitz and his staff became determined to achieve a naval victory that would especially and directly help the embattled German forces in the Soviet Union. Therefore Dönitz directed his protégé, Oskar Kummetz, commander of the Scharnhorst task force, which included five destroyers, to prepare for a surface-ship assault on the Murmansk convoy that was to sail in December. At the same time, he directed the Arctic U-boat force to deploy patrol lines to intercept, shadow, and attack these convoys in conjunction with Scharnhorst and whatever Luftwaffe forces could be brought to bear.
British codebreakers provided exceptionally good information on the German plans and movements. When the next convoy, JW 55A (nineteen loaded ships), sailed from Loch Ewe for Kola Inlet on December 12, Fraser was very much alive to the possibility of a Scharnhorst sortie. He lent the convoy strong distant cover with two task forces that went all the way to Kola Inlet. One force consisted of his flagship, the new battleship Duke of York, the heavy cruiser Jamaica, and four destroyers. The other was made up of three cruisers, Norfolk, Sheffield, and the Belfast, the latter severely damaged early in the war by a mine planted by the duck U-21. Convoy JW 55 A arrived in Kola Inlet with no losses. The Duke of York task force remained in Russia for two days, then sailed for home on December 18.
As Christmas approached, two more Murmansk convoys set sail. On December 20, JW 55B (nineteen loaded ships) left Loch Ewe for Kola Inlet. On December 23 a return convoy, RA 55A (twenty-two empty ships) left Kola Inlet, accompanied by the task force of three British heavy cruisers. By this time a U-boat patrol line, Eisenbart, consisting of eight boats, had taken up positions in the waters between Bear Island and northern Norway. The Luftwaffe provided a few reconnaissance aircraft, but all except a handful of the dive-bombers and torpedo-planes had been transferred from Norway to other theaters.
Admiral Dönitz met with Hitler at Wolfschanze on December 19 and 20. Among the topics discussed was the Arctic situation. According to the stenographer’s notes, Dönitz said that the Allies possibly had resumed the Murmansk convoys and that “if a successful operation seems assured,” Scharnhorst and five destroyers would attack the next one bound to Russia. The standing doctrine for big-ship sorties would be adhered to: If the enemy posed a threat to Scharnhorst with his big ships, she was to avoid an engagement and return to Altenfiord, thereby denying the enemy a propaganda as well as a material victory. Moreover, Dönitz said, he had diverted five more new U-boats to reinforce the diminished Arctic force*and if the Allies had indeed resumed Murmansk convoys on a regular basis, he would send yet more U-boats to the Arctic.
Dönitz returned to Berlin briefly, then set off for Brest to spend Christmas Eve with U-boat crews. While he was en route, a Luftwaffe aircraft sighted convoy JW 55B bound for Kola Inlet. Dönitz canceled his visit to Brest and stopped in Paris. He put the Scharnhorst task force on three-hour notice and persuaded the Luftwaffe to mount increased surveillance for the convoy and to look for distant covering forces. On Christmas Day, he returned to Berlin, where he authorized the Scharnhorst task force commander, Erich Bey (temporarily replacing Oskar Kummetz, who was ill), to sail. Owing to very heavy seas that restricted movements of his five destroyers, and the lack of Luftwaffe support, Bey, hero of the battle of Narvik in April 1940, was reluctant to go, but go he did, that evening.
Based on information from British codebreakers, at 2:17 A.M., December 26, the Admiralty warned Bruce Fraser: “Emergency. Scharnhorst probably sailed at 1800, 25 December.” At about this same time, Luftwaffe aircraft and three of the northernmost U-boats of the eight in the Eisenbart line*reported fleeting contact with the eastbound convoy JW 55B near Bear Island and attempted to pursue.
In foul weather and Arctic darkness, the opposing forces jockeyed for position. Using Enigma decrypts from the Admiralty and superior radar on his ships, Bruce Fraser quickly got the upper hand. While he put his task force (Duke of York, Jamaica, and four destroyers) on a course to cut Scharnhorst off from retreat to Altenfiord, he ordered the task force of three cruisers (Belfast, Norfolk, Sheffield) commanded by Robert Burnett, joined by four destroyers from the escort group of returning convoy RA 55A, commanded by R. L. Fisher, to close and attack Scharnhorst from the opposite direction. From Berlin, Dönitz exhorted German forces: “Strike a blow for the gallant troops on the Eastern Front by destroying the convoy.”
In the early hours of December 26, Boxing Day, the Belfast found and reported Scharnhorst less her five destroyers, which had unaccountably separated. The four British destroyers from RA 55A joined Belfast, Norfolk, and Sheffield, but they could not get into position to fire torpedoes. The cruiser Norfolk, which had eight 8” guns, opened fire and scored two hits on Scharnhorst, which in turn twice hit Norfolk with her 11” guns. Suspecting correctly that Fraser’s modern battleship Duke of York with 14” guns was part of the trap, Erich Bey ordered his five errant destroyers to attack convoy JW 55B, while he turned Scharnhorst south at thirty knots for Altenfiord, outrunning the three British cruisers and four destroyers.
Bruce Fraser’s maneuver to cut off Scharnhorst worked perfectly. Late in the afternoon, his Duke of York got Scharnhorst on radar at a range of thirty miles. Fraser closed and opened fire with his 14” guns and achieved hits that slowed Scharnhorst. Thereupon, his cruiser Jamaica and Burnett’s overtaking Belfast and Sheffield opened up with 6” guns. Then Fraser’s four destroyers (Saumarez, Savage, Scorpion, Stord) and Fisher’s four destroyers from convoy RA 55A (Matchless, Musketeer, Opportune, Virago) closed on Scharnhorst to shoot torpedoes and fire 4.7” guns.
Realizing the Scharnhorst was doomed, Erich Bey radioed Hitler and Dönitz that he would fight to the last shell. In a near replication of the slaughter of Bismarck, the British ships closed and destroyed Scharnhorst with guns and torpedoes. The destroyers Scorpion and Matchless fished out thirty-six enlisted men of her 1,943-man crew. All other Germans perished, yet another major defeat and humiliation for the Kriegsmarine, one which naturally infuriated Hitler.
The U-boat line Eisenbart played only a minor role in this Arctic naval battle. No other boats found convoy JW 55B; one boat aborted with mechanical defects. Upon learning of the loss of Scharnhorst, Dönitz directed the seven remaining Eisenbart boats to the scene to search for German survivors, but no boat found any. On December 28, the newly arrived U-957, commanded by Franz Saar, age twenty-four, found and shot two T-5 homing torpedoes at two “fast ships” but neither hit, extending the period of U-boat nonperformance against the Murmansk convoys into January 1944, a fallow and frustrating ten months for the Germans.
The loss of Scharnhorst left only the Arctic U-boat force to interdict the Murmansk convoys and repel the long-expected Allied invasion of Norway. Although Dönitz knew well that the U-boats were practically useless for either mission, politics demanded further reinforcements, again at the expense of the Atlantic U-boat force; on December 27, Dönitz directed that the Arctic/Norway U-boat force be increased immediately to twenty-four boats, all VIIs adapted for Arctic operations. Six more new boats arrived in the Arctic in January.*
The Arctic/Norway U-boat force was organized into two combat flotillas, the 11th in Bergen, commanded by Hans Cohausz, and the 13th in Trondheim, commanded by Rolf Rüggeberg. Both bases had concrete U-boat pens like those in France. However, refit and repair facilities were limited. New Type VIIFs (torpedo-supply boats), the U-1060 and U-1062, ran back and forth with matériel for a modest advanced U-boat base in Narvik. On December 22, a flight of nine Beaufighters patrolling off southwest Norway found and attacked Karl Albrecht’s U-1062 with 20mm cannons and a torpedo, inflicting severe damage, but the boat reached Bergen the next day. The U-1062 and her escorting surface ship shot down two Beaufighters.